>
> > Date: Thu, 28 Aug 1997 18:43:45 +1000
> > From: Giles Lean <giles@nemeton.com.au>
> >
> > On Thu, 28 Aug 1997 00:45:21 -0700 (PDT) William Coldwell wrote:
> >
> > > To the best of my knowledge, this issue has been resolved, and anonymous
> > > ftp access has been restored. CTM access has been revoked though, as this
> > > violates licensing terms of many of the contributors to NetBSD.
Thank you. And actually, Thank you for providing the service in the first place
as well!
> > It has been *claimed* that a CTM distribution of the NetBSD source
> > tree violates some of the license terms of files in that tree.
> I cannot see how CTM can be more of a license-violating method than
> any other packaging. True, CTM mails diffs, and thus the distribution
> time scope is a bit extended but it still contains all the information,
I don't use the CTM software, but I believe it would happily send you diffs
for files you don't have. Someone could retieve a bunch of code changes and
use them in say - a commencial unix - and would honestly be able to say they
didn't have license agreements attached to them. The simple fix sounds like
having a separator that can be identified at the end of the license and
sending the whole license every time. A better fix might be a comprehensive
license like...
"License restrictions may apply to files or portions of files retrieved using
CTM. The particulars for any file are found in it's header and may be
retrieved ftp.netbsd.org (etc...) or by using the CTM command line option..."
> packaging at another layer, in my mind. What about the reget command
> in ftp servers, should that be disabled too?
I'd have to look at the code. Reget certainly checks that the file exists,
and how much is there. I'm not certain it verifies the contents in any way.
If I dd if=/netbsd bs=1 count=2000 > filename can I reget filename from an
ftp server without complaint?
> If this is the law, then we might as well stop using software
> altogether.
I don't think this is law. I believe it's an attempt to abide by the
license requirement to distribute the license with any code covered by it.
David
david@vex.net